What Is Experience-Centric Observability?

Experience-Centric Observability (ECO) is a revolutionary approach to app and/or video-streaming monitoring and analytics that shifts from a system-centric to a user-centric focus to help businesses deliver more flawless customer journeys across their digital platforms. Traditional observability has almost exclusively monitored and addressed backend issues, meaning that operations teams are relying on performance metrics as a proxy for the user experience, but without any direct insight into what users are actually doing and seeing on the frontend.

Quality of Experience, however, is actually the missing link for modern digital businesses. They need to guarantee seamless user journeys in order to promote ongoing engagement, retention, and growth, leading to steady or increasing revenue for the platform. The downside of traditional observability is that the lack of visibility into the user experience leaves teams attempting to improve experience and thereby engagement just by throwing resources at every performance problem that arises, without any real validation of whether their fixes are positively impacting the frontend user.

What teams really need is insight into how those performance issues correlate to the user experience in real time. This will help them prioritize the most business-critical problems in the moment, but also work on addressing more minor concerns that may be impacting engagement over time. This is where Conviva comes in. Experience-Centric Observability is our proprietary solution for digital businesses looking to connect user experience to system performance in real time, so you can understand how your customers’ interaction with your technology affects the quality of their digital experience and their long-term engagement.

Core Components of Experience-Centric Observability

Conviva’s new ECO approach enables teams to optimize the most critical touchpoints in their user journeys, including: subscription, login, content discovery, and (for streaming platforms) playback experience. The core components of Experience-Centric Observability are intended to deliver a complete picture of what is happening at each of these four critical user experience touchpoints.

1. Census-Level Data Ingestion

Conviva’s extremely light SDK delivers real-time and comprehensive ingestion without data sampling from multiple clients.

2. Advanced Event Contextualization

Our no-code UI converts raw events from an ecosystem of devices, platforms, and operating systems so they all mean the same thing, regardless of where they originated or how they were labeled by the original development team. You can then translate this data into useful contextual sessions for analysis such as “successful purchase” or “searched for content.”

3. No-Code Server-Side Metric Creation

Conviva’s server-side metric builder supports companies in easily creating the metrics that matter to them, such as the time it takes users to subscribe, the number of users able to log-in under 2 minutes, and more. The metric builder empowers operations teams by giving them the agency to track user experiences they think are important to the business without ever needing to update the SDK or chase software teams to prioritize new development.

4. Operational Efficiency through Artificial Intelligence Alerting and Root-Cause Analysis

Our AI-driven alerts surface anomalous events and point out issues that companies often may not even know they should be looking for. Since these alerts also come with full root-cause analysis, they can save ops teams tens of thousands of labor hours every year.

5. Clicks, Not Queries on Real-Time Data

The Conviva UI enables operators to click on any dimension—device type, CDN, OS version, ISP, region, or network request—and drill down into an issue without needing to write a single line of code or query. Out of the box Conviva provides 50+ dimensions for analysis, and digital businesses can also build their own metrics and dimensions for a truly custom view of user experience.

6. Issue Prioritization Based on Cumulative Quality of Experience (QoE) Impact

Conviva’s ECO empowers ops teams to quickly elevate and resolve issues impacting a customer’s ability to use their company’s product or service.

Experience-Centric Observability Best Practices

Let’s take a moment to differentiate Conviva from other observability tools on the market. Although most of them claim to deliver at least some amount of insight into user experience, when actually attempting to use such solutions for the kind of real-time, at-scale, high-performance, high-cardinality monitoring and analytics needed to keep up with users, businesses will quickly encounter skyrocketing costs and ever-expanding tech needs. Even so, they often don’t achieve the speed and detail required to solve user problems as they’re happening. Conviva’s approach to ECO has avoided these hurdles and made it possible to deliver real user journey insight at a reasonable cost by establishing several best practices.

• Our platform operates around stateful metrics, rather than simple ones. Instead of tracking mere event counts (e.g., number of successful logins) or rates (e.g., buffering ratio), stateful metrics can tell you what’s happening, when it’s happening, and how long it’s taking, plus the state of the various clients and services involved in the action. This allows businesses to work with a holistic, fully contextualized picture of every moment in a user journey – and all this without requiring operations teams to write any code or queries. 
• Our platform enables teams to monitor only the events that are important to their business. Narrowing attention to essential metrics and events minimizes extraneous noise, streamlining the identification and resolution of issues in vital areas more efficiently, thereby minimizing downtime. 
• Our platform delivers AI-guided alerts for critical events. Conviva’s AI Alerts can be configured to instantly and automatically notify businesses of issues that truly impact user experience so that operations teams know exactly what to prioritize and how these improvements can impact revenue. This approach also saves hours, days, even weeks of time, since the alert comes with a full summary of the issue and what is causing it, meaning teams no longer have to query data lakes or manually comb through logs to surface the root cause behind a critical issue. 
• Our platform ensures data can be centralized. A unified repository and consistent language for app events provides ops teams with the comprehensive visibility required to achieve a continuous and reliable app delivery process. It also offers an easy path for remediation if other teams across the business need to become involved in a solution.

The Significance of Conviva’s Experience-Centric Observability

Experience-Centric Observability is a game-changer for digital platforms, not because it replaces other monitoring solutions and analytics tools, but because it streamlines the entire monitoring and analytics process by eliminating noise, surfacing time-sensitive problems that actually impact business goals, and optimizing resource allocation across a business’s teams and tech stack. Instead of having to run expensive queries on data-lakes for every small or large problem that arises and divert engineering teams to solve app performance issues that may or may not be relevant in the long run, digital businesses can easily optimize their user experience in real time, ultimately minimizing major issues that need to be addressed with more expensive resources. Here’s how that can positively impact a business over time:

1. Enhanced User Satisfaction

ECO’s ability to give direct insight into the user journey helps teams improve user satisfaction by addressing pain points in real time. Teams can maintain and iteratively improve services, which helps generate customer loyalty and revenue growth. Conviva’s Experience-Centric Observability allows businesses to compute crucial metrics derived from multiple sequences of events and calculate metrics based on time between events, giving full insight into exactly what the user sees from the moment they login to an app until the end of their session.

2. Proactive Issue Resolution

Conviva’s experience-centric observability approach is accompanied by an AI-guided alerting system that surfaces important issues and deviations as they occur, so that teams can identify, prioritize, and resolve issues before they impact the user experience and revenue. This ability to proactively address issues, including client-side performance problems (errors, crashes, page load times, network request durations, etc.), results in minimal downtime and disruptions.

3. Automatic Correlation of Engagement to Performance and Experience

The ability to directly monitor user experience, as related to app performance, means that businesses now have a clear window into app loyalty, purchase patterns, retention, churn, and other key aspects of user engagement. With Conviva, you can understand exactly how your backend performance and user experience influences users to engage, buy, or sign up for your platform.

4. Intuitive Event and Metric Management

Conviva’s platform is designed to enable Experience-Centric Observability, thanks to a simple, easy-to-use UI for setting up business-critical events and metrics. Conviva’s sensor captures all data, so operations teams know they aren’t missing anything, but also allows for semantic mapping in the backend to select only the most important events and build metrics around them. Complete control of what events are captured, how much data is ingested, and how that data gets analyzed, all without the need for writing code or running queries, results in significant cost savings for the business.

5. End-to-End User Journey Insight

Conviva’s ECO approach gives teams the ability to understand and answer crucial questions about users for every session, all in less than a minute. Operations teams can locate and understand the root cause for issues like delays in subscription time, high login failure rates, etc., in just a few clicks.